There are more things in heaven and earth

April 27, 2010

Criminal offenses

This is Desire Dreyer, who committed suicide at the age of 16 due to bullying and consequent depression. As her mother describes it:

These girls threw things at her in classrooms (while the teachers turned their heads and walked out of the classroom), chased her into the girl’s restrooms at school and told her if "it" didn't happen inside of school it would outside of school. There were other incidents of a group of girls that followed her home from Homecoming in 2005 and threatened her in front of our house. The bullies even went as far as to be waiting on her one night when the school bus she was on (the cheerleaders had to ride the bus to away football games) arrived back at her High School. They followed her to a local restaurant and surrounded her car. My daughter called the police from her cell phone.

...I was told by the small school principal that the problem was taken care of, only to find out the group of girls did not stop. My daughter did not want to go to school, her grades dropped drastically, she became severely depressed. I did not know that the bullying was the cause; if only I had known then what I know now, if only I had known that all the signs she portrayed were signs of being bullied, which lead her to depression, which in turn led her to suicide.

This is a fate which is reserved for children in our country. Among adults, we actually pay attention to such legal definitions as:

Criminal harassment is defined as "engag(ing) in intentional conduct which the actor [harasser] knows or has reason to know would cause the victim, under the circumstances, to feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated; and causes this reaction on the part of the victim. (M.S. § 609.749, Subd. I).

Yet our society feels little obligation to protect children from this same criminal behavior.

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Monday was a heartbreaking day for a local family, who had to bury their 12-year-old daughter.

The young girl took her own life, and her family says she decided to commit suicide because she was bullied at school.

. . .

"They used to beat her up, they used to harass her, curse at her, call her 'train tracks' because she had braces, they used to cut her hair," mother Mercedes Herrera said. "I went to the school, they didn't do nothing about it."

Mercedes found Maria hanging by a belt in a closet of their home last week. She died later at Brookdale Hospital. The family blames bullies for Maria's death, but they also blame the school, PS 72.

"She made a statement last year that she wanted to kill herself to the guidance counselor, and he never got help for her," Mercedes Herrera said.

Mercedes made no fewer than 20 visits to the school to complain about bullying and ask for help, but there is apparently no documentation of those visits.

. . .

"It's hard to understand how there isn't any record of it," father Eduardo Esparra said. "We want justice."

. . .

Research shows that girls who are frequently victims of bullies were 32 times more likely to be depressed and 10 to 12 times more likely to think about or attempt suicide compared to girls not affected by bullying.

Let me say, having worked with many datasets in the fields of social work, public health, and medicine, that a risk or odds ratio of "32 times" or "10 to 12 times" is virtually unheard of. If I saw such a number in the SPSS or SAS software output my first thought would be that something had gone wrong with the model, that that just couldn't be. So if this study they're referencing is true, it indicates that bullying is devastatingly harmful to young people. And it means that we are allowing young people to be killed by crime -- by what would be known as "criminal harassment" or a "hostile work environment" -- if only it were happening to adults.

But children? Eh, you know. Whatever. Can't be bothered, kid. Roll with the punches.